The Greatest Portraits Ever Taken By Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was an Armenian-Canadian photographer, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time.

Yousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep) Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). He grew up during a time when he as a child and he and his family witnessed the great famine of the period, costing the family the life of Yousuf’s sister, and the ensuing 1918 pandemic along with the atrocities and severely harsh measurements of mass deportation by the authorities on the Armenian minorities living in the Ottoman Empire, the so called “the sick man of Europe”. He later wrote, “I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.”

Speaking about his Photography, he was very powerful in using studio lights.He had Photographed many famous personalities all over the world during his reign in Photography. In all his photographs there was a essence for the person he has captured which is very much visible to us. He says ” My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble”

Beautiful. And, he didn’t capture these images with a modern snap, snap camera. He viewed the subject upside down on the ground glass, came out from under a dark cloth. loaded a film holder, pulled the dark slide and studied the person, face to face, not through a ground glass or viewfinder. He could get more tone out of the black and white process than anyone. Congratulations to this site. The images are spot on.